So the guys at Bethesda let it slip a few months ago that Elder Scrolls V was in the works for 2010, and a friend said he read a possible release in 2009... I'm looking for the article, but I'm friggin' STOKED about a new Elder Scrolls game coming out in the next 12-18 months!!!

I think they can learn a lot with the successes and failures of their previous landmark releases like Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3 and make ESV an absolute KICK ASS game!

The thing about MMO is I have absolutely zero interest in interacting with other players online. I don't want to have to rely on somebody to complete a crucial quest, nor do I want somebody else to feel reliant upon me. Having a crew of NPCs that I control (like Dragon Age) is fine, but other than that, no thanks.

The only time I ever played on line was Star Wars Battlefront II, and the only thing I did was fly a fighter. I didn't do anything dickish like shoot down my own teammates, but I certainly didn't give a crap when they died. Eventually I quit playing because I got sick of the morons who would wait by the spawn points and kill you before you could get to a ship. Douchebags.

The thing about MMO is I have absolutely zero interest in interacting with other players online. I don't want to have to rely on somebody to complete a crucial quest, nor do I want somebody else to feel reliant upon me. Having a crew of NPCs that I control (like Dragon Age) is fine, but other than that, no thanks.

The only time I ever played on line was Star Wars Battlefront II, and the only thing I did was fly a fighter. I didn't do anything dickish like shoot down my own teammates, but I certainly didn't give a crap when they died. Eventually I quit playing because I got sick of the morons who would wait by the spawn points and kill you before you could get to a ship. Douchebags.

(Sorry to go off on a tanget)

You know how social I am...

I'm in a huge guild in LotRO, but I only have a handful of friends I ever really do things with. I can do larger stuff if I want to, since I'm in a big raiding guild, but I've never really been forced to do anything I didn't want. 99% of the time I don't even pay attention to the guild's chat channel.

I played that way in WoW, and Star Wars: Galaxies and even EverQuest. It's really possible to be anti-social in an MMO.

I'm not in beta, so I can't say for sure, but group size in TOR appears to be 4 players, rather than the traditional 6. And the game is supposedly being designed so that you can do each class story (we're talking 200 hours of content here x 8 classes - this is why they say it's KotOR 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10) completely solo. Some of the world arcs require quests, but my guess is if you ever decide to try it, you'll discover that you can be as curmudgeonly as you like.

Those combat changes look really interesting. I like the idea of skillsets being dropped and the entire system being an organic level by use setup. Although it does make one wonder how it will be balanced. As in, if I'm so moved, can I work on everything and be some uberterminator sword/staff/stealth/dagger/shield/bow/spell wielding freak.

Those combat changes look really interesting. I like the idea of skillsets being dropped and the entire system being an organic level by use setup. Although it does make one wonder how it will be balanced. As in, if I'm so moved, can I work on everything and be some uberterminator sword/staff/stealth/dagger/shield/bow/spell wielding freak.

Wasn't it like that in Oblivion? Pretty sure it was. If you jumped enough times, eventually you could pretty much fly because your jumps would get so huge.

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ZootedGranny:

"That's the reason my FFL team name is TrentGreenLeadBlock. When you see this mother****er coming around the corner on a block, put your children to bed and batten down the hatch on your girl's snatch, because the same power that destroys defenders can scar the minds of the youth and simultaneously impregnate any woman within sight, live or on television."

Many aspects of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim will feel familiar to longtime fans. The exploration of a vast open world, first-person combat, and interacting systems of melee, magic, and stealth are all tent pole ideas within the franchise. However, Skyrim introduces something new into the gameplay mix: dragon shouts. This special new set of powers stand apart from the existing magic system, offering a broad range of powerful effects. The ability to attain these abilities is unique to your hero in the world, and the path to attaining them is a quest in itself within the larger tale that unfolds over the course of the game. Dragon shouts give the player the same overwhelming might that drives the resurgent dragon population, and the same source of power that launched the last line of emperors.

“It’s in the lore,” declares game director Todd Howard. “It was like the classic barbarian battle cry. I’m not sure if it showed up in a book in Daggerfall, but it’s definitely mentioned in this pocket guide to the empire that we did for Redguard. It was the idea that the Nords had these battle cries, and they would shout at their enemies.” As the team at Bethesda began to design The Elder Scrolls V, they latched onto this little piece of mythology, and the way it could tie back to the dragons – powerful creatures that had been absent from the world for thousands of years.

Quickly, elements of the fiction began to fall into place around the dragon shouts, much of which was already firmly entrenched from previous games. The dragonborn are a unique group of mortals, gifted by the gods with the same power as the dragons. To be trained in the art of the dragon shouts, also called the Voice, dragonborn individuals travel to Skyrim in order to climb a great mountain called the Throat of the World. At its peak they reach High Hrothgar, where an ancient sect of powerful Voice users named the Greybeards train them in their art.

“In the lore, Tiber Septim was the first main emperor. He could shout. His way of the Voice was unmatched,” Howard explains. “He is the original guy who walks the seven thousand steps and talks to the Greybeards. And the idea is, at that time, that they were so powerful they had to have all the villages flee for miles. This little kid is walking up this snowy mountain, and all these people are packed up and they’re walking down and away. Because they know the kid is going up to talk to these guys, and when they talk there’s going to be avalanches.”

The ability to use the dragon language already exists in the fiction, called “Thu’um.” The concept roughly translates as “The Voice.”

Tiber Septim would use the dragon shouts to lead his troops into battle and unite Tamriel under one empire. Hundreds of years later, the Septim line has died out, and no other dragonborn have been seen for many years. That is, until the hero of Skyrim arrives on the scene. “There are other people in the world who can use the dragon shouts, but it’s very rare. It’s like arcane knowledge. It used to be done more in the past,” Howard explains. “The Greybeards know it. But your ability to absorb the dragon souls and do the shouts on the level that you can is beyond them.”

In the game, players will guide their hero to learn ever more powerful dragon shouts, and then use these arcane powers to supplement other combat and magic skills. Upon defeating a dragon, Skyrim’s hero absorbs the soul of the fallen creature, which fuels his ability to learn a new shout. Later, players can search out long lost walls covered in dragon script. Upon these walls, individual runes stand out to the hero because he or she is dragonborn. “There are these words of power, and if you learn how to say them right, they have a powerful effect,” Howard says.

Over time, players will build a vast arsenal of shouts: over 20 complete shouts in all, each with multiple words that must be gathered from different places around the world. “There are three words for each shout, and there are three levels to them. The amount of time you hold down the shout button is how many words come out,” Howard continues. “It becomes a bit of a collection mechanic – to collect all the words.”

Bethesda games have always had a strong internal consistency. Dragonborn and the shouts they employ stand at the center of the Skyrim game experience, so there needed to be a rich background to make the system feel authentic. The answer lay in the creation of a language – the ancient tongue spoken and written by the dragons. The mammoth task of tackling such a project fell largely on senior designer Emil Pagliarulo.

“The first thing I worked on when I came to Bethesda was the Bloodmoon expansion to Morrowind,” Pagliarulo tells us. “And back then, I started really entrenching myself in all this Viking culture stuff. One of the things I listened to back then that I was able to find again recently was a reading of Beowulf in Old English. That was always my inspiration. What would an epic sound like? So I knew what I wanted it to sound like.”

But where to start? In the case of Skyrim, Pagliarulo had a distinct goal in mind. He knew there would be these scattered walls across Skyrim from which the dragonborn would learn the shouts. Here was a chance to create a whole new branch of mythology and legend for the world of Tamriel, writ large upon the ancient ruins of the land for players to discover. The team also wanted to have the language work into other elements of the game, including as a song that could be integrated into the main Elder Scrolls musical theme – the music that gamers would eventually hear in Skyrim’s teaser trailer.

“It had to rhyme in English and the dragon language. It had to tell this epic story,” Pagliarulo explains about the challenge of creating the stanzas that would populate the Skyrim theme. “But I also knew we wanted to use it for the game. It was sort of interesting, because we knew we wanted to have this language as a game device, because we have these gameplay mechanics built around it. So, you’re not developing it as an actual language. It’s much more word based or hieroglyphic based.”

Almost immediately, the challenges of creating a new language began to appear. How do you handle past, present, and future tense? Do verbs conjugate? What is the alphabet like? All of these were issues that needed to be addressed if the language was going to be useable in the game. “We started off making specific rules for the way words would work together,” Pagliarulo says. “So the way you would do ‘king’ would be the word for ‘son’ and the word for ‘leader,’ except you take off this one letter. And then we realized that it had started to collapse under its own weight. The more rules we wanted to keep track of, and the more complex it became, we knew the more complicated it would be for the designers to use, and the more mistakes we would make. So we really tried to keep it much more simple.”

The language concept that emerged abandoned tense, conjugation, and even upper and lower case letters, preferring that the context imply those ideas. For instance, in the translation of Game Informer’s back cover, the word “fundein” translates to “unfurled,” but it could mean either unfurl or unfurled, depending on where the word is used. Similarly, the word “prodah” could mean either foretell or foretold.

“Once we established the baseline, and the designers started using it, I was glad we kept it simple,” Pagliarulo says. “Because, boy, can it get out from under you. You’ll be like, ‘I need a word for “thunder,” I’ll do this.’ And you’ll realize you already have a word for that, and it was spelled differently. Then you have to go back through and fix all those instances. It’s a remarkable lesson in why the word ‘dear’ [or ‘deer’] means so many things in English.”

Not everything had to be such a tremendous challenge. Because Bethesda was designing the dragon language from scratch, they could shape the way it sounded to the vibe they wanted to express in the game. “You can choose the words for a concept that sound the best. The ones that feel more epic. The ones that roll together well,” Pagliarulo declares. “Like the word ‘dovahkiin.’ ‘Dova’ means dragon. ‘Kiin’ means child. So we did a lot of that. We played with the words. How did it all flow together?”

The sound of the dragon language when you hear it spoken or sung has a vaguely Germanic or Scandinavian sound to it. It’s a harsh but oddly beautiful sound that feels right at home in the rugged landscape of Skyrim. And you’ll hear it in plenty of places. Not only do the dragons and the Greybeards recall this long-dead language, but many other creatures in the world do as well. Included among them are the undead draugr, ancient Nord warriors who will call out in dragon language from their skeletal frames, threatening to pull you down to join them.

Beyond crafting the spoken language of the dragons, Pagliarulo and the rest of the developers at Bethesda needed one final important element to make their new language shine: a written alphabet.

“The idea was, how would the dragons write or scratch this language in the stone or on the ground? Everything is done with the three talons. You’ll always see combinations of one to three scratches, and sometimes the dot, which is like the dewclaw,” Todd Howard explains. With that concept in mind, someone had to make the idea into a reality: concept artist Adam Adamowicz. “One of our concept artists [Adamowicz] had the task of making a font. Make unique symbols for these letters that sound like this, using this scheme. He was literally like, ‘What?’ I think he sat there and stared at his monitor for an hour. And we came back, and he’d say, ‘I still don’t…say it again?’” Howard laughs.

Working together with Adamowicz, a final runic alphabet emerged. “It doesn’t coincide directly with the alphabet we use in English. There are 34 unique characters within the language,” Pagliarulo says. Some Roman alphabet letters don’t exist, like the letter "c". In other instances, a single runic character represents multiple Roman letters, including many double vowels like “aa” or “ei.” For ease of use in implementing the language into the game, the final font was designed to work in word processors like Microsoft Word. Many of the number keys on a traditional keyboard are co-opted within the font to include the additional dragon characters.

Take a look at the individual runes in the written dragon language. Can you see how each character could be written by a creature with three front talons and a dewclaw? Even the shape of the letters echoes claw marks.

After months of work, the dragon language began to take shape and be implemented into the game. Even now, the designers at Bethesda continue to add new words to support the in-game existence of the dragonborn and dragon shouts. An entire internal wiki at Bethesda contains an evolving vocabulary list of words and phrases used in the game – any new uses of the dragon language have to be checked back against this list for consistency.

In the game, the final result of all the hard work is exhilarating, and even more so when you know how deep the rabbit hole goes. Every ancient wall you encounter carries an ancient legend. Every creature that cries out in dragon is saying an actual translatable thing to you. And perhaps most importantly, every dragon shout you acquire carries real meaning behind it. One power used in the game acts like a sort of invisible push of staggering power. Spoken in the game, your hero will intone the three words for the full shout: “Fus, Ro, Dah!” Translated into English, “Fus” means force, “Ro” means balance, and “Dah” means push.

After collecting more than 60 individual words that form up into over 20 complete shouts, Skyrim’s hero will be a force to be reckoned with, especially considering that these dragon-based abilities will be layered on top of his normal leveled-up abilities in combat, traditional magic, and stealth. He’ll be able to slow down time around him with one shout, or use a special whispered dragon shout to stealthily move close to an enemy in a mere instant. And while they’re cagey about the details, Bethesda says that one shout will let a player summon an actual dragon, calling him by name to fight.

The new dragon shout system, and the language that supports it prove one thing without a doubt. Bethesda is crafting one of the most intricate video game worlds ever made. Layered on top of over 15 years of previous Elder Scrolls games, the land of Tamriel has a depth of fiction you’d be hard-pressed to find anywhere else but in the most elaborate and well-loved fantasy novels. Many players may dive into the world of Skyrim this coming November and perceive the magic of the dragons and their shouts as a mere afterthought. You know better.

“This is the Jedi game to end all Jedi games. If you're a gamer and you don't throw your hands up in triumph when you get your first lightsaber, you're not really alive. This game is, bar none, the best interactive Star Wars experience ever.” – VI

Bethesda has finally given an idea of the prize awaiting babies born on the game’s release date: a free Steam key for every game Zenimax/Bethesda has ever, and will ever release.

We told you a few days ago that Bethesda had come up with a one of a kind quest for their fans in the lead-up to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The challenge was simple enough: give birth to a child on the game’s release date, name them ‘Dovahkiin’ after the protagonist, and help yourself to an “unknown reward.” Not a small thing to ask of prospective parents, but now the developer has revealed just one part of the prize, and it may have you thinking twice about adding to the family. If the child is born, and named as they have asked, then they will be blessed with a Steam key, granting them access to every Zenimax/Bethesda title. Past, Present, and Future.

Before you abandon your computer to talk your significant other into reconsidering their previous stance, we should give a little context here. If you’ve never heard of The Elder Scrolls, then you will likely read this story and laugh at its ridiculousness. If, however, you are familiar with one of the greatest RPG franchises in past and modern gaming, then you know just what a fantastic experience to expect from Skyrim.

Honestly, how many games can be generating this amount of buzz before any fan has seen a single second of gameplay footage?

There is no underestimating the die-hard Elder Scrolls fans, or just how well-known the franchise is to gamers around the world.

Let’s make one thing clear: we sincerely doubt that anyone is going to plan a pregnancy around what will amount to a few hundred dollars worth of prizes, and give their child a name that will be making grade school a daily pain. But desire isn’t the only factor that needs to be taken into account.

We should point out that it appears the publishers themselves haven’t even decided what the final reward will be for ‘Conception Quest’ completion. They obviously are aware of how much they’re asking, since the first prize they’re revealing would be a dream come true to Bethesda fans.

“If anyone is seriously considering this, we’ve got a few ideas in mind for a collection of quest rewards. How’s this for a shower gift: a Steam key that will grant you, and presumably Dovahkiin him/herself, every ZeniMax/Bethesda game — past, present and future — for life. Once your child eventually achieves cognition — and grows old enough to play intense video games — we think it will agree that this key blows away a pink pleated onesie. As for the rest of the loot, we’ll leave it as a surprise.”

You read that correctly, the lucky family will get access to every Bethesda/Zenimax title for the rest of their lives. In case you don’t recognize just how much is implied by that statement, allow us to remind you that aside from the Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3 maker, Zenimax Media are also the proud owners of id Software, makers of Quake, Doom, and the upcoming RAGE. We don’t know how much thought they’ve put into this so far, but you see our point.

If you’re thinking what we’re thinking, then they must have some big ideas to let this one slip so early. Regardless of the prize, it seems that people should be seeing this as a sweepstakes or lottery, not a marketing or cash-grab like other cases of people tattooing logos on themselves for a quick buck.

There are certainly huge fans of TES who have already named their children after characters, and are anticipating Skyrim more than any other title. Because of that, Bethesda wants to really do something special with their next hit.

Think of it this way: somewhere out there, a fan of The Elder Scrolls is hunched over their computer monitor, taking in every single detail about Skyrim that they can find. While a small addition to their family is slowly and secretly taking shape, their thoughts are completely occupied with dreams of waiting in line for the game’s release, and calling in sick for a few weeks to lose themselves in the teased world of dragons, giants, and undead.

But on November 11, they won’t be lined up outside GameStop - they will be at the hospital. While their friends will be Facebook-ing their delight with finally having the game in their hands, and tweeting their progression through the game’s story, our fan will instead be living a life of diaper-changing and eardrum-shattering screams.

No dragons for them, just months until they will have a good night’s sleep, let alone time to play a video game. Rather than have this story end so sadly, Bethesda is willing to show that they care. Give your child a name from the game series you so dearly love to prove you’re a fan, and you’ll never have to pay a cent for one of their games ever again.

You will have paid more than enough, and gotten the privilege of celebrating the newest entry in your own epic story alongside the game’s publisher. If only other publishers would show the same level of commitment to their fans.

When you think of it that way, this kind of seems like a fantastic idea, doesn’t it? There is little chance of it happening, and even if it does it will barely cost Bethesda a penny. But it could just mean the world to one family out there, and that’s the whole point.

You might want to watch the game’s first in-game video released tomorrow before you decide, as nothing would be worse than naming your child after one of the year’s biggest disappointments.

We’ll find out if there is a lucky winner or not when The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is released for the Xbox 360, PC, and PS3 on November 11, 2011.